I met Lallan (Anirudh Lallan Choudhry) at the Sunshine Himalayan Cottage facility in the Tirthan Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India. The managing host of this facility, Panki Sood, introduced us. Lallan, is a multi-disciplinary artist and socially engaged artist who practice is ‘rooted deep in working with the earthen, on a severe lookout for the conditions which enable genuine co-authors within communities, forming narratives through extra-human design and enquiry’. He is the founder of Baadii, a rural art-house in Himachal Pradesh where he currently lives and is also working on community arts projects at Sunshine Himalayan Cottage with Panki and his team, which you’ll hear about in a few minutes. I want to thank Panki for introducing us and Lallan for this first conversation.
Note: You can hear his latest musical production, Kyun, here). Below is a rough translation of the lyrics :
Show notes generated by Whisper Transcribe AI:
Action points
Story Preview
Imagine an artist who champions rural wisdom, bridging ancient traditions with contemporary art to spark cultural and ecological movements. Discover how Lalan is building vibrant arts ecosystems in the Himalayas, proving that art can be a powerful catalyst for change.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Call for Artists
01:29 Setting Up an Arts Ecosystem
03:25 Learning from Rural Communities
06:30 Art as a Medium of Connection
08:06 The Journey of a Self-Taught Artist
10:01 Creating Impact Through Community Art
12:28 Current Projects and Future Aspirations
Featured Quotes
Behind the Story
Lallan’s journey from documentary filmmaker to socially engaged artist is rooted in a deep connection to rural communities and a desire to address pressing ecological and cultural issues. His work challenges the dominance of Western artistic models, advocating for a return to traditional wisdom and collaborative art practices that empower local voices.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Lallan
My advice to artists would be drop every garb that you have, drop every piece of knowledge that you think you have. Head to the jungles, head to the rural places. We are living in a time of crisis. We need artists more than the scientists. We need artists more than the healers. We need artists more than anything because arts connect everybody. We need songs, we need stories, we need pictures, we need circles, we need Ubuntu to prosper. Traditional Western ways of, colonized ways of working will not save us as a species. They're not going to help us. They're only going to destroy. And the traditionally arts ecosystem exists like that everywhere in the world. Now we know that it's been going on for hundreds of years. We need to destroy that as artists and we need to head to where our roots are, which is in the soil. And our arts come from there.
[00:00:46] Claude Schryer
I first met lallan at the Sunshine Himalayan Cottage Facility in the Tirthan Valley, Himachal Pradesh in India. The managing host of this wonderful facility is Panky Sood, who introduced us. lallan is a multidisciplinary and socially engaged artist whose practice is rooted deep in working with the earthen on a severe lookout for the conditions which enable genuine co-authors within communities forming narratives through extra human design and inquiry.
[00:01:29] Claude Schryer
Episode 235. So this is a good coincidence. I'm in Thirtan Valley in India and we just met yesterday and sang at the Sunshine Cottages here in the Himalayas. And we met at dinner last night and you were talking to me about a residency that you're doing here, so I'd love to hear more about it, tell me where we are and what's going on here.
[00:02:01] Lallan
So it's not just a residency that I'm doing here. I'm setting up an arts ecosystem that's focused more on creating narratives based in the rural geographical context of where we are based to come out with meaningful work, socially, ecologically, that resonates across the space, the people here, the demography and time, and across other civilizations, including our near India ones in Delhi, Bombay, Pakistan, wherever, you know, across the world as well.
[00:02:37] Lallan
So that's the kind of work I have been doing for the past seven years. We've been doing that in a different district. And right now, as you met me, I'm in the process of setting up that here. So I'm setting up an arts ecosystem. I primarily work with villages because I believe that they are the keepers of all the traditional wisdom, the harmony and all the greenery and beauty and agriculture and all the wisdom that the modern industrialist mindset, the illiterate mindset, I would rather put it very directly, does not have any clue about and it needs to understand from them if anything needs to happen in the ecological side of things which we are seeing, is it a rapid killing right now caused by this mass of huge global. I don't even have words for it. We're going through the worst times, climate wise and ecologically.
So the only people in my opinion are these people because they've been living here with that wisdom for I don't know how long now, since the beginning of time. And the reason for setting up this kind of spaces is that we get to learn, be it architecture, art, sculpting, woodwork, agriculture, anything that is out there for us to learn as humans, we need to learn again. But we need to go back to our old ways. Wherever we are based in the world. The people who founded the first agricultural societies, that was it, the modern industrial, you know, growth oriented, so-called growth oriented mindset, it needs to come to these places to realize that this is how we live in harmony and that's how we can create work. But the thing is that these people are now bearing the effects of that, you know, the shock waves that are, that are there across the world. So this ecosystem, as I've been working for the past seven years, is aimed towards that.
And also we're adding a couple of new things where, you know, there are, there's a foundation we work with where children are involved who come but to study. There are people all over the world who come here to the national park and to, you know, the surrounding places. So this areas of great ecological importance because we're at the brink of. This is the only, by the way, free river in all of north. Everything else has got a dam built on it. People have fought for this river to be free. So, you know, these kind of things are there.
So my work here is how can we highlight the cultural importance of this place, get that in the arts somehow, get people to work on it, talk about it, create artworks, create narratives and movements and meaning, whatever they can in their capacity as an artist, whatever I can in my capacity, and share that with the rest of the world.
[00:05:33] Claude Schryer
In my podcast, I've been doing a series on community, social, engaged art. And I'm happy to see this as a model because it's not unique. There are places all around the world, but it is unique because it's in this space, it's in this particular geographic region. And I think it's not by chance that we meet.
[00:05:56] Lallan
I don't believe in chance because here.
[00:05:58] Claude Schryer
We are connecting continents, cultures. We were talking about the number of Indian people in Canada and so on. There are so many connections between our nations and between our peoples. And the arts tend to be a zone of exchange, right. Of collaboration and that. So I'd like you to talk more about your own work as an artist and how that connects to. Because I know you're a filmmaker and you're doing music and sound because you're coming from a place of great conviction, from what I can tell, because you're building, literally you're actually going back into the older worlds, which I think I agree with you, is something that we need to do.
And it is happening in Canada with Indigenous people and all around the world. And maybe that's what will save us as a species, I don't know. But certainly, arts and culture are fundamental to who we are. So tell me more about your work.
[00:06:59] Lallan
Okay. It's a little hard to talk about my practice because I'm not a trained artist. I don't have a degree or something in the arts, but I've worked for extensive years under various artists and I still continue to learn from a lot of people and my peers. So I have worked as a writer and a documentarian filmmaker for about 12, 15 years of my life, working on all issues possible, especially in this subcontinent that from water crisis to pollution to, you know, women issues, child issues, urban infrastructure issues, and working with agencies across the world and the government on case studies, as, you know, how documentaries go to highlight them. And hence that made me travel a lot of this beautiful subcontinent and. And work with a lot of diverse communities across this huge, huge land. And so that's what I've done for my initial years of my life.
And that shaped my art practice because, you know, as an anthropologist, you get to study a lot of these things. And that has formed my art practice. And since the last 15 years, I've been practicing as a contemporary artist, but my work is not contemporary at all. I work with rural societies. I've been an artist in residence at a project in rural Astan, where I've lived and archived folk music and arts for a lot of years were tribal folk and arts. And that gave me a lot of context into the history of where sound comes from, how festivals are made, what is music, stuff like that. That personally, is something that I love doing.
So when I came out of it, I made a lot of political statements with my work. I usually make socio political work that is spread across 3, 4 mediums. Mostly it combines installation, it combines earthen media and combines people. It really does so in my work I seek not to be an expert at any medium. To me, to go after the form is not my cup of tea. A lot of people have been beautifully doing it and you know how the commerce of it works. It's actually against the arts if you really ask me, because I come from a tribal background myself.
My forefathers were tribal pastoralists. So genetically I am still that. So in India, especially if we talk about people, we come from a very. Our society has art and all societies I believe in the world has art imbibed in our culture right from when we're born. So we have songs for seasons, we have people doing this house that you're sitting in, it's made by the people here. Nobody's a qualified architect or a qualified sculptor. We have that culture and I'm more drawn towards that rather than the western ways of schooling and universities and degrees and working and all that.
So that kind of politics I'm against. So most of my work deals with issues that everybody's dealing with these days, you know, climate issues, issues of non-representation of arts was a big thing when I started working. So I've made some socio-political narratives. One of them for example, deals with how industrial cinema is out there and how, you know, cinema as an art form is not even considered how we have the industrial cinema taking over the world thanks to the Hollywoods and Bollywoods of the world. And it has just trampled the beautiful art form under its foot. That's an issue the world has been dealing with. So I made a body of work on that.
I made that folk archival, you know, that project there in. In rural Rajasthan that I've worked for several years. For the past seven years I've been working on this project called Badi which I founded in rural Kangra, which is the next district, another beautiful valley in Himachal Pradesh, which is about this ecosystem that you're talking to me about this. How can you as an artist live and create work in a rural so called remote setting where nobody even expects a doctor or an engineer to even work. So how can you make art there? And that's what I've been doing and showing people. So I founded a community art space, an art gallery and it's an artist led initiative where artists from a lot of parts of the world have come.
I've worked with a lot of organizations which includes naturalists, educators, village folk crafts persons, scholars. So we have A beautiful ecosystem there that I've successfully created. I can say that that has had an impact of course as well on rural communities. And in that I have made a lot of, co-produced a lot of work with a lot of other artists. And my focus is not specially on working with artists. So I have made work with little women, little girls and women from the village and got them involved. The government schools, the rural government schools of Himachal Pradesh.
I developed, I don't know even how to put it, but an installation, grand five-piece installation body of work that focuses on microbiology, that I work with the help of a naturalist from National Geographic and the government school of Himachal Pradesh and combining them to make installations, stuff like that. Then botany is a huge part of what we do here. Then architecture, of course. So I started a residency where I invited artists from different parts, from the top art college in India actually to come and work. Went there for a lecture myself, got invited, invited those students to come and work with me. Then we created a body of work which is about what are we losing as heritage in terms of architecture, clothing, et cetera, et cetera to the modern wave of new colonization and all those things. So there's one body of work like that similarly, a lot of work like that.
So this is extensive work that we develop over several years. So for the past seven years I've been doing that and now we're trying to do the same here. And as we speak we are working on an exhibition that you met our friend Panky yesterday. He's an amazing photographer and birder and naturalist. So he has a beautiful documentation of birds and butterflies here. So we're getting some kids from the foundation to paint those and make and get those paintings exhibited and get the community together, get the kids to be exhibited, not like a traditional artist in here and have people speak about the flora and fauna and those pieces especially. So right now I'm working on that exhibition in this part alongside developing the residence.
[00:13:51] Claude Schryer
Well, there's so much we could talk about and our 15 minutes is almost up. What advice do you have to artists who are listening around the world about what are concrete actions that are required at this time?
[00:14:04] Lallan
All aesthetic work, everything needed for decoration and anything needed for entertainment. That's my point of view. It can be highly negated, but right now it needs to be stopped. We've had enough of that. We need movements, we need cultural movements, we need social movements. And because we're in a time of crisis and arts is the only way through which as we have seen as people, as a people. The revolutions have taken shape in space.
We need that more than anything. The arts today have become more than important than any other thing. More than political movements, more than, you know, more than any economic movement. We need the arts to understand the elemental. And the elemental, you only get to get to really be tactile with it once you are dwelling with the arts in some way or the other.